Just off the key of reason
by storm-petrel
Summary: red wine is for lovers, you think, but it goes in your basket anyway.   RemusxSirius, a series of drabbles depicting their relationship. T for language and 'adult themes'.
1. Anacoluthia

_anacoluthia_

_Lack__ of grammatical sequence or coherence, especially in a __sentence._

_You're beautiful_, he whispers into your ear, wafting smoky breath across your sharp cheekbone, eyes wide and dark, so dark you can't tell where pupil ends and iris begins. Maybe he doesn't have irises at all, maybe his eyes are one big black pupil, like a vacuum that feeds on souls. Like a Dementor, but worse, beautiful.

And then his head dips down and those lips do _something_ and fuck, all thoughts of Dementors are gone, blown away with a puff of stale cigarette smoke.


	2. Red wine is for lovers

Red wine is for lovers

The harsh lights of the co-op blink at you in the darkness. The 'r' in Co-operative has fallen sideways, bumping gently against the 'a', you notice as you wait for the slow automatic door to recognise your presence. It does, sliding open lethargically and you step in, the rubber sole of your sneaker squeaking on the slightly sticky floor. The cashier at the desk looks half asleep. Either that or drunk, you think. You pick up the butter and the two packs of microwave lasagne, grab a bag of Maltesers for the walk back to your flat and head to the aisle at the back of the brightly lit shop. The six pack of lager goes in your basket without a thought, but your fingertips linger on the five pound bottle of red wine.

Red wine is for lovers, you think. But it goes in the basket.

The twenty-pound note is crumpled, the cashier barely opens his eyes as he scans the items, and the plastic handle digs unpleasantly into your hand as you step out of the too bright pool of light.

You pitch up outside his block the following evening, bottle of cheap wine clutched tightly in nervous fingers. The door buzzes open and you follow the halogen lights up the endless stairs to his flat. He opens the door, stubble darkening his jaw and beautiful hair rumpled. You hold out the wine without a word.

Red wine is for lovers, but he cracks it open anyway. It's wrong, you think as you take turns swigging from the bottle, tangled together on the couch that leaks stuffing onto the floor, because when he kisses you he doesn't taste like firewhiskey or cheap Muggle lager. He tastes like red wine and the liquid has stained his tongue mulberry and his lips crimson and his breath doesn't burn your throat as it mingles with yours.

The half-empty bottle falls to the floor and leaks onto the grey carpet.

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_**~I liked this when it first occurred to me, but it turned out differently to what I had in mind. I should have written it down straight away instead of waiting and it coming out wrong :/ ~**_


	3. Diaphanous

**Diaphanous: adjective**

**1) of such fine texture as to allow light to pass through; translucent or transparent.**

**2) vague or insubstantial**

His skin is almost translucent in the sun.

You admire the play of the sunlight across his hipbones, the dark shadows the jutting bones cast on his hard abdomen. You watch the shapes spread across his abs as the tree outside the window waves its leaves, and you watch on the screen of his chest as one leaf detaches itself from the tree and spirals gently downwards. Your gaze follows the path of the leaf, tracing the patterns of his muscles before becoming distracted by the light that streaks along his prominent collar-bones and pools into darkness.  
His shoulders are broad and smooth, the skin pale and stretched tightly across muscle and bone, and your eyes run almost deliriously down his strong arms to the delicate formation of his wrists. One hand is flung to the side and the sun has chosen this hand to shine on, this hand to favour with its beam of light. You can almost see through his skin, the fine bones just rising up to create thin ridges and shallow dips and the shadows are beautiful. You've never been a particularly creative person but in that moment, you know.

Sirius Black is a work of art.


	4. Mussitate

**Mussitate- Verb: to silently move the lips in simulation of audible speech**

He turns up on your doorstep at two in the morning with wet dark hair dripping down his back and a wild look in his eyes. You can only thank your lucky stars that your mum's gone out to dinner as he shoves you inside and crashes his lips onto yours. You respond in kind, twisting him round so you can push the front door closed with your foot, the pungent smoke wrapping around him and binding his body to yours. You feel his lips move against your collar bone, and sense rather than hear the words he paints onto your skin. _Make me forget._ The words have been breathed into your skin so many times you feel them burning day and night. Maybe you'll get them tattooed there one day, you think, and push away a smirk of contempt. Like you'll need a tattoo to remind you of these desperate, burning, forgetting times.

_**

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~I like this one. Thoughts, anyone?~**_


	5. Sense

_Sirius left. He's here. He's alright._

The words are brief, but you know what they mean, and the implications sink into your stomach. He went to James. He went to James, and not you.

_It makes sense_, you tell yourself. James' house is bigger, his parents wouldn't have been surprised to see the boy is practically their second son turning up on their doorstep with a suitcase. Mr and Mrs Potter know what Sirius' family is like, yours don't.

It makes sense, but it hurts.

**~just to clarify, this is before Sirius and Remus become 'romantically involved'. I'm on a roll tonight!~**


	6. inchoate

_Inchoate_

_1. In an initial or early stage; just begun_

He's almost painfully beautiful, really, all high cheekbones and aristocratic contours and soul-devouring black eyes and (you had better stop right there because this is dangerously close to crossing the thin line that separates appreciation and lust)-

The black hair that tumbles around the handsome face, flops over that high forehead and just teases his shoulders with its flirtatious curls is messy yet somehow sleek at the same time, and your hands itch to touch it, to tangle your fingers in it. The toned body and broad shoulders are just a bonus, you think, because all you really need is black locks to run your fingers through and fathomless eyes to lock with your own. (But you need the rough lips that graze against your skin, however much you pretend)

**A/N: **_**hello :)**_ _**I had a name-change, and so did the story, but it's still me! Sorry for not updating for a while, I've got a notebook full of drabbles that I haven't typed up yet so bear with me! x**_


	7. imago

_**Imago  
**__1) An idealized concept of a loved one, formed in childhood and retained unaltered in adult life._

You never thought he'd die.

You were sure, the thought so strongly ingrained in your mind you never thought it would falter, that his fire would blaze forever, that his star would never burn out, and yet somehow you never imagined him being old either, surrounded by happy grandchildren and a comfortable home. Perhaps you thought he'd just live forever in all his seventeen-year-old glory, never quite an adult, but not really a child. The boy who never grew up.

Seeing his head fall back and the veil reach out to snag him doesn't really seem to be happening at all. You watch the smile still tug at the corners of the rough lips, see the mane of black hair just touch the filmy surface, notice the white vapour steal across his forehead in a kind of dream. It dances down the high forehead, gently closes the fathomless eyes and covers with a whispered touch the still too-prominent cheekbones, and as it creeps towards the rough lips, reaching out with wispy tendrils to kiss them, the Azkaban-ravaged mask seems to flicker and for a moment the painfully beautiful, blazingly young Sirius Black arcs his shaggy head back as a river of laughter escapes from chapped lips with a torrent of grey cigarette smoke that wreathes the face that haunted your dreams for seventeen odd years. And then it's gone, claimed by the veil, and you watch his body fall gracefully back (he was never anything other than graceful) and you're restraining Harry even as your heart falls through the veil with his lifeless body.


	8. Lucifugous

_Lucifugous_

_Avoiding light._

You don't accept that he is gone for a long time.

He can't be; he's Sirius Black. It will all have been a joke. Any minute now he'll pop up on your doorstep wearing that insatiable grin, and he'll say, _"Gotcha there!"_ or _"Did you miss me?"_ or _"You should've seen your face!"._

But he doesn't.

You get the word _forget_ tattooed in a beautiful flowing script along your collar bone, minute letters reaching out to embrace one another. It's ironic, really, because you never thought you'd forget, but the alcohol and Muggle drugs do funny things to your brain and you never quite seem to stop dreaming.


	9. Crepuscular

**Crepuscular, adjective;**

**Of, pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim.**

His shadow is darkening a patch of the ground on James' doorstep, but the smoke that billows from his lips doesn't print its image on the asphalt. Maybe it should, or maybe he shouldn't, because he and the smoke are one and the same entity and shouldn't be separated by something as trivial as light.

You don't go out to him. You watch, with your face pressed against cold glass, as he sinks to the floor and rests his bare arms on his knees. You can see the goose bumps that spike his skin. The cigarette is sucked between his lips, the arm swings back down, the lips purse, head tips back, and smoke billows insolently towards the cloudy sky. It's dark but the light that streams from the hallways and through the glass panes of the door is enough to travel through the smoke and bounce off the ground.

Your gaze is fixed on the shadow, but one breath fogs up the glass and obscures him from view.

**~~A/N: no, I am not dead, dying, or abducted by aliens. I do, however, have a shitload of art to do, and the only time I can write these is in Physics. So bear with me, and I'm sorry for not updating sooner. X~~**


	10. Aoristic

**Aoristic, adjective;**

**1. Indefinite; indeterminate.**

**2. In grammar: A tense of the verb indicating past action without reference to whether the action involved was momentary or continuous.**

You try to paint him once.

You've always fancied yourself as a bit of an artist, and indeed the sky is just the right shade of greyish blue and the tree he sits against looks so real you could almost touch it and Sirius laughs a little and strikes a dramatic pose for a moment before lapsing back into his former position.

But when you try to paint the pensive face, to fill in the shadows that nestle under his cheekbones and hollow out some emptiness into the page for the eyes, the black of the hair bleeds into the white of the high forehead as if desperate to touch the shadows of his cheeks and the emptiness of his eyes spills over and down his face. Maybe it's because you need new paints, but whatever the reason the colours fuse into one another until he is a grey smudge against the brightly coloured backdrop of autumn leaves, and you crumple the page in frustration.

Maybe a photo would be better, you muse when, paints discarded, you sit beside him on the damp leaves. His head is tipped back against the bark and his eyes are closed, lids stretched tight over nothingness. It would make a lovely photograph, you're sure, but the camera stays resolutely in your bag. Maybe it's silly, but you've always thought that moments like these are more special when they're not caught and kept for all to see.

(but really, you're scared that maybe, somehow, he won't show up at all)

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**A/N:** Expect updates in their merry thousands cos I'm ill and have nothing better to do. :-) Enjoy


	11. smoke

If someone were to ask you when it was that he started smoking, you wouldn't have been able to tell them. You doubt even he could. It's something that's always been there, as long as you can remember, the smell of smoke and the ash-stained fingertips are as much a part of Sirius as your 'furry little problem' is of you. You can no more imagine Sirius without the fog of smoke than you can James without his obsession for Lily. You think maybe it's something that's grown with him, maybe he was born with a fag in his hand, maybe the ash is secretion from his skin and maybe tar runs in his veins instead of blood, perhaps his bones are built from stubbed out ends of cigarettes and his skin is smoke made tangible, moulded together and stretched thin, wrapped around his bones like bandages round a mummy, and if you were to slit his skin grey vapour would float out and he'd deflate like a balloon and collapse into a pile of ash.

_**A/N So this is from my oneshot **__**You Go Out Like A Riptide**__** (shameless self-advertising there :p) but I'm putting it in here cos I quite like it **___


	12. manumit

**Manumit, verb;**

**1. To free from slavery or servitude.**

You never speak about it.

It's kind of an unspoken agreement. You both ignore that it's happening, even while his heart is clutching yours, even when he storms into your flat bringing a blast of cold air and damp leaves and smoke, knocking over your coffee table and your self-control with one fell swoop, even when you drive icy words and icier knives into his skin with your tongue because it's too much, all too much.

Maybe it's because you can't find the words, or maybe because you can find too many words and they're too busy jostling for space on your tongue that they don't float free.

For seventeen years, there are no words. Seventeen years full of jagged emptiness.

The three years you spend with him, after you stop being JamesSiriusRemusPeter, but before it's just Remus (they're achingly, solidly, forever-ly, gone) are filled with loud silences and quiet shouts (and just stop there boy)

The fourteen years after, the betrayal and the loss and the cracks in your plastic shell spreading, aren't any more eloquent.

But when he's gone the words come.

His slightly crazed laughter _(please don't let me be like Bella, please, Moony)_ bounces around your head, and finally, finally, the words spill out of your heart and soak pieces of paper. You scribble them on parchment and carve them into your desk and scratch them into the inside of your skull (maybe, wherever he is, he'll read them, somehow) and press them tight to your lips for the briefest of seconds before letting them fly free, like they've wanted to do for so long.

**A/N so I don't really understand this one, it's my slightly drugged up mind running wild. Blame it on the flu. Enjoy **** (and leave a review?)**


	13. Words

**A/N So yeah, this quote does not belong to me in any way shape or form, and I am aware that I did not write this and it probably shouldn't be here. But I like it very much, and I think it sort of fits with their whole relationship, so yeah. Bite me. **

"I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand and the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep and there are no words for that."

— Brian Andreas (Story People)


	14. efface

**Efface, verb (used with object), -**

**1. To wipe out; do away with; expunge: to efface one's unhappy memories.**

**2. To rub out, erase, or obliterate (outlines, traces, inscriptions, etc.).**

**3. To make (oneself) inconspicuous; withdraw (oneself) modestly or shyly.**

He presses his face into the hollow of your collar bone and your arms wrap around him with automatic ease. He tosses his head, rubbing his face against your cotton-covered chest, rubs and rubs and tries to slip inside your skin.

You think, with an air of detachment that is second (first) nature to you now, that he's trying to wipe his skin off so he can stain your white shirt cherry red with his blood.


	15. acuity

**Acuity, noun;**

**Acuteness of perception or vision; sharpness.**

The four of you are sitting out by the lake, in the space that is unanimously accepted as yours and yours alone, and he is laughing.

It makes your jaw ache just watching the slightly manic grin stretched so tightly across his full mouth. He is laughing at the Giant Squid splashing first years, at a cloud forming a rude shape, at James trying to catch Evans' eye from where she sits, fanning herself in the shade of a big tree.

The fuller his grin the emptier his eyes, but the blushing fifth year walking past, and Dorcas sitting with Marlene and Lily and the unnamed girl whose brown eyes are lazily trailing over the four of them, don't look past the smile.


	16. effuse

**A/N This chapter is dedicated to ****The Marauder Named Prongs****, who asked me to **_**give us something happy next time**_**. Well, here's my feeble attempt at something more light-hearted. It failed, I'm sorry.

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**

**Effuse, adjective**

–**verb (used with object)**

**to pour out or forth; shed; disseminate: The **_**town effuses warmth and hospitality**_**.**

It's one of the nice days. One of the days when he sits with you and Peter and James in the Potters' kitchen, and watches a pregnant Lily make dinner. One of the days when he wears his laughter like a gossamer cloak instead of a shroud, one of the days where the chains of his own making slip free from his raw ankles and bruised wrists and he floats up to the ceiling like a helium balloon.

Lily drops the rolling pin, and the sound of it hitting the floor echoes like a whiplash across your ears. James is at her side in an instant, and she sags against him, both hands pressing to the curve of her stomach. Their cheeks are pressed so tightly together you can't tell where one ends and the other begins, and their mouths flutter like moths as they whisper urgently to one another. Then she straightens her back, and separates their faces. "She kicked!" she tells them with a broad smile painting her cheeks, James' arm resting around her waist like it's always been there.

It's one of the days where he leaps up from the table and kneels before her, resting his hands against her stomach. It's one of the days Lily laughs at him, and moves his hands to where he could feel it better, and one of the days you move to hug Lily and Peter stands by James' shoulder, and James' insistent cries of "It's a he, Lils," and Lily's firm voice telling him it's "Mother's instinct," are drowned out by the shout of delight from Sirius as he feels the baby dance before his fingertips. It's one of the days he grabs your hand and pulls you down beside him and your eyes grow wide as the baby kicks again.

It's one of the days that always slip past you, and one of the days you try to keep locked up inside you, and one of the days that will inevitably break free from your grasp.


	17. Chapter 17

You go to the bar one night. It's not the bar just down the road from Sirius' grotty flat or the bar you go to with your mates or the bar with the flickering neon sign that you drove past once on your way to visit your mum. It's the bar you've never been to before, the one you saw the ad for in the newspaper thrown through your door last weekend. You drive to it in the battered two-door Ford that's only held together by magic and copious amounts of TLC instead of Apparating (it's a Muggle bar) but you have to park three blocks away, and the rain drips down the collar of your ancient leather jacket. You would hurry, but your feet don't really want to go any faster than they are and so you ignore the irritating way your damp hair flops into your eyes and the small river of cold water trickling down your neck.

Your sneakers leave damp prints on the carpet as you squelch your way over to the bar and collapse onto a bar stool, taking off your jacket and trying to wring as much water from it as possible. You order a beer from the tired-looking barman who smiles weakly at you. "Alright?" he asks and you nod. He slides your beer over the slightly sticky counter. "Cheers," you say and he takes his turn to nod in acknowledgement before turning to the customer who just arrived. You sip your beer.

A gust of freezing air hits your back as someone enters the bar, letting the door slam behind them. You stare into the amber liquid fizzing gently in your glass, and try not to think about the drop of water that has now reached your shoulder blades.

A girl who smells like shampoo and rain sits on the school next to you, ordering a gin and tonic and dropping a soaked jacket on the floor. You take another sip of your beer and listen to her swear to herself as she tries to wring some of the water from her dark blonde hair. _"Fucking English weather,"_ you hear, and _"Why can't the sky stop pissing on us just for one bloody day?_" you chuckle to yourself at this, and she looks up, blushing a bit. "Don't stop," you offer, a little hesitantly, and lift your glass to your mouth. She smiles slightly before the barman passes her her drink and the slightly awkward eye contact is broken.

She sips her drink, and you finish yours and order another one. You listen to the steady drip of water on the floor.

After a while, when only the lemon is left in her glass and there's a puddle beneath your sneakers and the alcohol running fire in your veins makes you feel a bit bolder, you turn to her again. She's staring at the counter like it holds the answer to all her questions and tracing the sticky drink rings with her index finger. You crack a lame joke, which neither of you find funny but somewhat breaks the tension, and it kind of goes from there.

When you kiss her, as is inevitable, three hours later, she tastes like citrus and smells like shampoo. Her lips are soft like Sirius' never were.

_**A/N Not sure about this one… It kinda dragged on a bit, but it's out now **____** Leave a review? xo**_


	18. meritorious

**meritorious, adjective**  
**1. deserving praise, reward, esteem, etc; praiseworthy**

He comes home from one of those Auror missions that he and James adore, and blood is streaking his face and matting his hair.

The ruby droplets trickle down one high cheekbone from the gash on his forehead, but there's a wild grin on his face and ferocious emptiness burning in his eyes. His blood stains your fingers as you carefully guide him to your kitchen chair and with a damp white cloth wipe the blood from his face. He babbles words stained with blood into your shirt as you gently lean his head forwards to heal the slice on the back of his neck. _There were four of them surrounding me, and I couldn't see Prongs_, he jabbers excitedly, and the blood soaks your shirt. _But I fought them off, and so did Prongs, and we killed them all,_ he laughs a little manically with a puff of red breath. The metallic scent of blood is all around you and you feel a little sick. _Did I do well, Moony?_ He asks, and your mind conjures up an image of black robes soaked with blood and silver masks pulled aside to reveal wide staring eyes and blood bubbling between lips and teeth stained red. _Are you proud of me, Moony?_

You close your eyes and breathe deeply, and think of green light and red blood and black empty eyes and exhale into the blood filled air.

_Proud of you Padfoot._

_**A/N **__**Hope you enjoy, and a very merry Christmas to all 3 **_


	19. privation

**Privation, noun;**

**1. An act or instance of depriving.**

**2. the state of being deprived of something, especially of something required or desired; destitution; need.**

If you leave your curtains open at night, you can see the stars from your bed. You trace the constellations with your eyes and when you sleep their images print onto the black canvas of you eyes.

When you lie curled up in the smoky sheets and stare out through the dirty windowpane in Sirius' city flat, the stars don't show. _Light pollution, Sirius says when you bring this up. The city doesn't need stars._

You like this thought. The city has its own stars, ones that don't need darkness to shine, and the cloak of artificial light obscures the sky's own wonders. The neon sign of the pub across the road is reflected in his dark eyes as he beckons you back to the bed and you cast one last look at the empty sky before curling back into the sheets.

You collapse back onto your bed, with fresh white sheets that don't have a hint of smoke, and watch the stars shine, unsullied by the too bright city lights and neon darkness.

**A/N **_**I wonder if I was too subtle about this one, there was a kind of metaphor I was trying to get across but didn't want to say it directly. Did anyone get it? **_


	20. equipoise

**Equipoise, noun;**

**1. A state of being equally balanced; equilibrium; - as of moral, political, or social interests or forces.**

**2. Counterbalance.**

There is cherry blossom in his hair, and the whole world in his eyes.

Candyfloss trees are almost painfully bright in the sun's rays, and the strong breeze tears the flowers from their perches. They dance on the air, a tornado of sugar spun pink and white, and bury themselves in the inky depths of his hair. His rough barks of laughter are echoing in your ears as he flings handfuls of blossom at you and your world spins into a rainbow of black hair and veiled eyes and blossom of the palest pink.


	21. engram

**Engram, noun;**

**1. The supposed physical basis of an individual memory in the brain.**

**2. A presumed encoding in neural tissue that provides a physical basis for the persistence of memory; a memory trace.**

He's kissing Marlene on the sofa in the common room. Her wine-coloured lipstick is smeared over both of them.

You're distinctly reminded of a polar bear tearing its way through a seal, an image from a documentary you watched with your mother in a distant life. You remember the blood stained muzzle being raised to the sky and the staring eyes of the seal, guts oozing wine-red across the snow and a wild, triumphant glint in steely polar bear eyes.

_**A/N I've got an electric guitar and swine flu. What more could a girl want?**_


	22. Kiwi

He's sitting on the dirty tiles in your kitchen when you get home from work, and a half-peeled kiwi is clutched in his hand. There's a bite out of the top, and his eyes (grey today) are fixed on it like it just moved. When you enter, he looks up at you and his lips are very red.

_I'm allergic to kiwis._

You know. You remember James and second year and a day spent with Sirius in the Hospital Wing. James still swears it was an accident.

You reach for the Muggle drugs in the drawer, and Sirius takes another bite.

_I love kiwis._

You stab your finger on a pair of tweezers and swear angrily, flicking on the light and throwing the offending object on the floor. Sirius sits in the corner and watches you.

_Forget the drugs. I like eating kiwi._

You finally seize the battered cardboard box and slam the drawer shut with your hip as you start towards him. He picks some more of the fruit's skin off with his fingernail.

You hand the medicine to him and he swallows three pills reluctantly, allergy-red and swollen lips closing around small white capsules.

**A/N back to school on Thursday, kill me now. Leave me a review? I don't like this one much...**


	23. toast

He is whistling as he slices bread.

You stand in the doorframe and swig cheap bear from the bottle clenched in your fist.

Two slices of bread are dropped into the toaster and he presses a few buttons and then starts to hunt for the butter dish. You stare at it, the little blue and yellow dish by the sink. The lager is warm in your mouth and you half drop, half throw the bottle to the floor.

What the fuck, he shouts, turning to face you and the shards of glass on the white tiles.

I can't do this any more, you say.

Your shoulders slump against the doorframe. Maybe tomorrow you'll be an adult and be responsible and pick up the broken pieces of the bottle on the floor but for now you're young and it hurts and you just want it to go away.

Please he says and it's not so much a plea as a statement. Please.

He moves forward, one slippered toe just touching the brown puddle stretched like an ocean between you. Glass crunches under your foot as you step away.

I can't you choke out. _Can't I can't I can't._

And the toast begins to burn.


	24. Toast number two

He's burning the toast again. He sits on the kitchen counter and fiddles with the dials on that temperamental Muggle toaster until grey smoke rises to the ceiling and you're glad the smoke alarm ran out of battery months ago.

_**~A/N. Yeah, I like the toast theme. Shh. Sorry for the prolonged absence, haven't had much time to write recently but that's changing now :p massive thanks to my amazing reviewers, hang in there! xx ~**_


	25. song

The (too short) time you spend with him is an unsung symphony of notes that should never be put together but somehow work. For years after, there is deafening silence. When you kiss Tonks, too many years later, in the empty kitchen of Grimmauld Place, with the weight of goodbyes suffocating you, there's a soft sort of sadness that sings a little, an off-key melody in the depths of your soul.

_**A/N Eh.**_


	26. nepenthe

**A/N this is dedicated to JJLiberty for being a fantastic reviewer and making me smile **** Hope you enioy!**

**nepenthe–noun  
1. a drug or drink, or the plant yielding it, mentioned by ancient writers as having the power to bring forgetfulness of sorrow or trouble.  
2. anything inducing a pleasurable sensation of forgetfulness, especially of sorrow or trouble.**

It's a month after That Day, (the one when everything changes and after years of wishing your complicated ... relationship... for lack of a better word, to be over, you're all too suddenly wanting it back) and you wake to dark hair strewn over your pillow. You think you're dreaming, and start to shake and your heart seems intent on freedom from your ribcage and the dark hair stains your pillow with loss. And then the boy opens green eyes and cracks a lazy grin.

Now you come to look at him properly, the hair is entirely the wrong shade of dark; dark like leather and flight and completeness, not dark like endings and desire and two hearts beating together in one ribcage.

Once he's gone, your sheets smell faintly of pine needles. You never thought you'd miss stale cigarette smoke quite so much.


	27. perfunctory

**Perfunctory–adjective**

**1. performed merely as a routine duty; hasty and superficial: **_**perfunctory courtesy.**_

**2. Lacking interest, care, or enthusiasm; indifferent or apathetic: **_**In his lectures he reveals himself to be merely a perfunctory speaker.**_

He kisses you instinctually, like babies know how to swim and lemmings know they have to die. There's no thought or planning or decision involved; it's just you and him and no space in between you.

The first time he ever kissed you was under the influence of too much Firewhiskey ('cause that's how these things always start) and after that he just keeps doing it. Sometimes you think he doesn't even realise that his lips are slipping closer to yours. It's just a habit that he's never thought to kick.

_**A/N so haven't updated in ages. No excuses this time :P but we break up for Easter a week tomorrow (whoop) so should be updating more **____** love to all my reviewers xx**_

Oh and sorry for any confusion in the previous chapter, nepenthe, because I think the green eyes thing made a bunch of people think he's sleeping with Harry. I didn't make it very clear but it's meant to be a day after James and Lily die and he's sleeping with some random guy who looks slightly like Sirius. But I like the different ways it can be interpreted (that awkward moment when my author's note is longer than the update)


	28. Frangible

**Frangible, adjective;**

**1. Capable of being broken; brittle; fragile; easily broken.**

He picks up a piece of ice from the ground and holds it up to the sun, sees the tiny air bubbles and tracks of water making their way down the sides, and then his fingers clench for a second and it shatters into a thousand pieces which make no sound as they fall to the ground. The pale sunlight shines off the whites of his eyes but doesn't reflect the pupils, and he turns to you with lips begging you for you don't know what and you fold him into your embrace because it's all you remember how to do.


	29. Infringe

**Infringe-verb (used with object)**

**1. to commit a breach or infraction of; violate or transgress: to infringe a copyright; to infringe a rule.**

He staggers into the dorm at three in the morning, hair a sopping mane down his back and the reek of Muggle alcohol and sex wrapping around him like a cloak. You swear quietly to yourself (your clean vocabulary has significantly deteriorated since knowing him) and help him over to the bed as quietly as you can, aware as you do so of James and Peter snoring across the room. He collapses onto it, and you turn towards the bathroom to get him a Sobering Draught kept expressly for this purpose, but a heavy arm loops around your shoulders and the fumes on his breath makes your head spin as he pulls you against his side.

He pushes his shaggy head close to yours and smacks his lips clumsily against your cheek before sprawling backwards, his arm around your shoulders meaning you fall backwards too. His Firewhiskey breath floats into your ear, carrying the half-formed words from his lips to your soul.

_Love you._

By the time morning comes, your legs are cold from the bathroom tiles you've been sitting on and you hate him more than you've ever done before.


	30. Ephemeral

**Ephemeral–adjective**

**1. lasting a very short time; short-lived; transitory: the ephemeral joys of childhood.**

**2. lasting but one day: an ephemeral flower.**

"What's that word," he says, making patterns in the dust with his fingertips, "Which sounds dusty and sort of pale pink and means something like dying?"

You glance down at him, his grey eyes as grey as his dust-coated fingertips on the floorboards. His hair is tangled and the dust settling in it from where he's pushed it back with dirty hands makes him look like he's going grey. It matches those eyes, you think. Dying eyes in a pale pink face sprinkled with dust.

"Ephemeral?" you offer, and the rose-tinted word settles in the dust between you.

He nods.

"It's a pretty word."

And you can't help but agree.

_**A/N yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, I'm sorry. Blah blah. It's gonna take me a while to get used to writing these things again so excuse the clumsiness and kinda rubbishness for a bit. Love to all. **_


End file.
